These days, animated movies are nearly all digital, and
we’re not complaining. When we’re being dazzled by the latest CG masterpiece, we don't miss hand-drawn cels, Claymation, or stop-motion. But then we saw ParaNorman and realized what we'd been missing. The darkly comic story of a boy trying to save his hometown from a centuries-old curse (screenwriter and codirector Chris Butler describes the film as "John Carpenter meets John Hughes"), ParaNorman is the first stop-motion movie to use a 3-D color printer to create its puppets' faces. It's also the first feature from Laika Entertainment since its Oscar-nominated 2009 hit Coraline. With tens of thousands of printed parts, millions of hours of work, and billions of pixels invested, the project represents unparalleled innovation in handmade storytelling—and a new future for a 100-year-old art form.

Photo: Chris Mueller

Thanks to interchangeable 3-D-printed facial components, Norman is capable of 1.5 million expressions. For the 27 characters with 3-D-printed faces, the rapid-prototyping department output 31,000 parts, which they stored and cataloged in a face library. One 27-second shot required 250 different faces for a single character. Each face is marked by tiny fissures where the components fit together, so a "seam team" removes the fine lines in postproduction.

The 3-D printers build up each character's face by depositing hundreds of layers of fine white plaster-vinyl powder, which is then sprayed with ink. (Laika named its four 3D Systems ZPrinter 650 machines Trillian, Tron, Samus, and Lapidus.) Photo: Chris Mueller

Animation supervisor Brad Schiff adjusts the puppets for the next shot.Photo: Chris Mueller

Norman's eye rig, which allows him to look right, left, up, and down, is made of 40 parts — many of them 3-D-printed. Here, the animator manipulates Norman's eyelid with an X-Acto blade.

Norman's hairstyle consists of 275 individual goat-hair spikes, styled with glue, hair gel, thread, and wire. "We made ourselves a topography map to ensure that his spikes always have the same layout," says Jessica Lynn, Laika's head of hair.Photo: Chris Mueller

The studio's riggers design and build a three-axis apparatus called an X-Y-Z rig, which gives the animators the ability to move the characters around the stage and position them precisely. The figures must be able to move incrementally in space and hold each position for the camera. (Wires are also used to hold props in place, and the seam team erases them from the finished image.) One of the most complicated rigs was used for a scene in which zombies rise from the ground, sending dirt and rocks flying everywhere. Each individual pebble and dirt clod was attached to a wire.Photo: Chris Mueller

Each frame is shot with a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR—twice. After the first shot is captured, a specially constructed interocular slider shifts the camera a few millimeters and takes a second shot from a slightly different viewpoint. Knit the images together and voilà: 3-D feature film shot with a sub-$3,000 camera.Photo: Chris Mueller

The characters' bodies are built over an armature, a stainless- and tool-steel skeleton with articulated joints that allow for a wide range of motion.Photo: Chris Mueller

Laika's 35 animators each produced an average of 4.4 seconds of footage a day. Their work, plus that of 58 visual-effects artists in postproduction, created this finished frame—and 244,733 others.Photo: Focus Features

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